This site is intended to continue support for the legacy 2.x line of the phpBB2 bulletin board package. If you are a fan of phpBB2, please, by all means register, post, and help us out by offering your suggestions. We are primarily a community and support network. Our secondary goal is to provide a phpBB2 MOD Author and Styles area.

I was using the no profile details mod and the nospam word mod, and the other day I started getting new usernames and immediate posting of spam again. They worked well for a long time but seem to be past their use by date now.

I changed the word in the nospam mod for now, which is holding them out again.

Whats the latest on anti-bot mods ? Looks like I need to add something new.

I haven't heard of yours before so I don't know how they work and how they could be improved, but Anti-Bot Question has never failed me and it's been several years now. Granted, my forum is pretty small so I don't expect spammers to go all out and crack its specific defenses, and I'm not protected against human spammers.

What it does is ask a question at account creation and when posting anonymously. You can make your own questions and include an image if you want, asking something like "What color is the biggest cercle in the image" or "How many of these apples are not red."

The no spam mod is basically the same. Ask the person to type in the word "nospam". It worked for several years, but obviously someone who makes bots went looking for why they were failing, and found a forum using that mod, and adapted the bot. Since a lot are using the mod unchanged, that would work.

I've changed mine now to a different word. And set it up so I can slide a new word in very quickly if need be.

Originally it was a maths question, but they adapted to that pretty quickly and changing the number didnt matter. Then I used a mod to change the maths question to nospam.

The no spam mod is basically the same. Ask the person to type in the word "nospam".

Is "nospam" the example word used in the mod and if so did you use the word "nospam"?

If that is the case then I am not surprised that bots manage to register as all the bot writer has to do is make that change to registration process.

I have installed the VIP mod and I guess it is very similar to what you are using. In 6 years no bot has ever registered - only a handful of humans and they are easily dealt with if you have a good team of moderators.
Now of course you can have a human register on many boards and then there will be a bot that follows up maybe days or even weeks later to post multiple spam posts. Looks like a bot registered and posted but it was a combined effort. The registrants are invariably poor people who would be paid a pittance for each registration they make.

Oh, so instead of asking for a captcha you actually give out the code on the EULA page? That's pretty clever, although I guess once someone knows about it it's easy to adapt your bot to fetch that code before proceeding to registration. Still really good for mindless bots attacking sites randomly.